WordPress advertising follow up, the results and numbers

 What's up everybody. Welcome to the episode of the PW podcast. I'm your host as always. And you can find this podcast at Peter Witham dot com. In this episode, I promised you a follow-up on my experiment with Jetpack and WordPress advertising. And that is exactly what we're going to do in this episode.

I think you're going to find it an interesting, I certainly did. So, let me give you a quick reminder here. Last week I set up a campaign on WordPress. To essentially advertise one of the CompileSwift podcast episodes, talking about. Developer. Stresses and struggles and dealing with all of that. And essentially pointing back to a blog post with that episode on PeterWitham.com. So how did it go? Well, Interestingly, I'm going to say it went better than I expected. And I will get into all of the details here. All the nitty gritty. But I would stress that you need to look at this as the big picture as we go through each of these numbers.

You may recall the duration of this campaign. Was March the first to March the seventh. So seven days. And the idea here is that it puts this advert on WordPress hosted blogs on the WordPress site. So wordpress.com. Not the self hosted version, but the people who are, have their blogs on wordpress.com.

So bear that in mind. So it ran for seven days. And it had a budget of $35. Now the total impressions for the seven days. Was 36,320. Which is really not that bad considering how much of a niche. Post.

This is right. Think about it. It's only really going to capture the eye of, developers and in particular, maybe developers who are having struggles with mental health and. Motivation and those kinds of things. So I actually think that's not a bad number considering, now, of that. The total clicks for those adverts is 88. Now I know what you're thinking. Wow. That sounds a lot less the impressions. That's probably not that bad in all honesty. When you think about it in context. And, not every impression is going to get you a click, it's. That's not the way this works. So 88 clicks, I don't think is bad, but let's put that in perspective here. So that's a click through rate. of 0.24%.

Okay. It sounds a little worse when you think about it in those terms. But honestly, I'm still pretty happy with this. That's really not bad. Right. And, you know, again, this is not a big budget, not by any stretch. Okay. So I really feel like this is, this is pretty darn good. I'm I'm pretty happy with this. Now overall, you know, traffic to my website.

Yes. There was a very slight bump. You know, there's those 88 clicks and it's never that simple because you know, you could still. See that click without, you know, you may have blockers on or something like that. So I did see a slight bump in traffic and in particular, I, I was looking for the traffic on that one particular post. And sure enough, that, that rose up through the rankings compared to other pages on the site. So I'm actually calling this. And overall success and, and I'm hoping that this gives you something to think about.

It's certainly gives me something to think about. This is. Better. Than I had expected and gives me more than enough information to think, you know, Should I do this again? And I think the answer is, yes, this is worth doing is my honest answer. And. Appraisal here. I think to be fair. I'm the one that's responsible for the content that goes in that advert.

So you can argue that, Hey, if the content and the advert that not that great. I'm directly responsible for that. Click-through and that's absolutely true. So the fact that I did a. You know, first past, first attempt at this and got the 88 clicks.

Tells me a lot for next time.

And I think there will be a next time. I'd like to revisit this. What I've got to decide now is. Do I go with the same one again? And adjust the advert. Because there's a lot to learn from just doing that right. As anyone knows you don't change everything. If you change everything at once, you don't learn anything from it.

But if you change one thing at a time, you learn so much more from what makes a difference and what doesn't. So I'm tempted to do that. And I'm also tempted to target a more. Broad scoping audience post on my website. And see what that does as well, but overall, I'm happy to report that.

I think this was well worth it. And I'm actually very impressed with this. And I'm going to recommend to you that if this is something that interests you, you may want to consider it as well. That's what I want to share with you in this episode.

I wanted to give you the followup, like I promised, and I'm even more delighted that I can give you. Good news. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Reach out to me, Peter Witham dot com forward slash contact. If you want to come on and talk about this. Great. Let's do that too, because as I said, in the previous episode, I don't know squat about marketing other than what I've learned.

And I know that there are people far smarter than me out there, and I can learn from you and hopefully for the other folks. What I've given you here has helped as well. And you can learn from that. That's it folks hope you have a great week and I will speak to you in the next episode.